Scraponomics Episode 115: The Brass Influence
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs
Watching the tribute to Frank Sinatra’s 100th birthday last month made me think about how influential brass is.
That sounds like an odd statement. The show was amazing, too, of course! But think about it. There’s a lot of stuff we use that is made from brass.
If you’ve been to Friedland’s museum, you may have noticed all of the cool stuff on the wall. Many of those items are made from brass.
Now, brass at it’s most basic structure as an alloy is a mixture of copper and zinc. The percentages of each metal can vary. The various ratios make up many different products that we use, from instruments, to irrigation valves, to figurines.
For scrap purposes, at Friedland, we take quite a few different types of brass; red brass, semi-red brass, and yellow brass to name a few.
The key difference between red and yellow brass is that red has a higher percentage of copper in it. Actually, along with zinc, it may also contain a small percentage of tin and lead. It’s also usually a cast, so you tend to see it as a type of valve.
Yellow brass, on the other hand, has a little less of a copper percentage, and an increased amount of zinc. It can be a cast, but can also be in sheet form. You’ll often see it in the form of plating or instruments.
In the case of red vs yellow, for example, red brass is worth more as scrap because of the higher copper content, so it’s worth our time separating them into different categories.
As you go about your day, look around and try to notice anything that could be made from brass. You may surprise yourself.
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